Writer Quotes by John Irving

My life is a reading list.

— John Irving

Nearly everything seems a letdown after a writer has finished writing something.

— John Irving

When I love a novel I've read, I want to reread it - in part, to see how it was constructed.

— John Irving

I believe that, in any novel of mine, the principal objective is the construction of the whole.

— John Irving

I believe a novel should be as complicated and involved as you're capable of making it.

— John Irving

but writers, Garp knew, were just observers - good and ruthless imitators of human behavior.

— John Irving

“It was from just a few sentences that a writer learned anything from another writer.”

— John Irving

I've always preferred writing in longhand. I've always written first drafts in longhand.

— John Irving

I think there is often a 'what if' proposition that gets me thinking about all my novels.

— John Irving

If I have any advantage, maybe, as a writer, it is that I don't think I'm very interesting. I mean, beginning a…

— John Irving

There's a lot of ignorance about how long it takes to write a novel. There's a lot of ignorance about how long…

— John Irving

I write very quickly; I rewrite very slowly. It takes me nearly as long to rewrite a book as it does to…

— John Irving

I'm not proselytizing my method. I don't believe that one writer should tell other writers how to write.

— John Irving

I think that writers are, at best, outsiders to the society they inhabit. They have a kind of detachment, or try to…

— John Irving

I am compulsive about writing, I need to do it the way I need sleep and exercise and food and sex; I…

— John Irving

When writing a novel, I'm not smart enough to know how to foreshadow something if I don't know what it is.

— John Irving

There's no reason you shouldn't, as a writer, not be aware of the necessity to revise yourself constantly.

— John Irving

I don't begin a novel until I have written, not just the last sentence, but usually, as a result thereof, many of…

— John Irving

I believe you have constructive accidents en route through a novel only because you have mapped a clear way. If you have…

— John Irving

“Of course, if I write a first-person novel about a woman writer, I am inviting every book reviewer to apply the autobiographical…

— John Irving

'Great Expectations' was an important novel in my adolescence. It was very much one of those emblematic novels that made me wish…

— John Irving

“If (a writer) has applied himself to an art for 15 or 20 years and they’ve gotten good at it, and they’re…

— John Irving

“Writing a novel is actually searching for victims. As I write I keep looking for casualties. The stories uncover the casualties." (Interview…

— John Irving

“She asserted that the best fictional detail was a chosen detail, not a remembered one - for fictional truth was not only…

— John Irving

I'm not typing. I write only by longhand. I've always written first drafts by hand and then once I was into a…

— John Irving

“When, if only for a moment, the novelist steps out of the creator's role, what roles are there for the novelist to…

— John Irving

“Novels were not arguments; a story worked, or it didn't, on its own merits. What did it matter if a detail was…

— John Irving

I have a process that I seem to always, to some degree, as a writer, adhere to, but I certainly have never…

— John Irving

“That was when Angel Wells became a fiction writer, whether he knew it or not. That's when he learned how to make…

— John Irving

Along the (writing) way accidents happen, detours get taken... But these are not "divine" accidents; I don't believe in those. I believe…

— John Irving

The unspoken factor is love. The reason I can work so hard at my writing is that it's not work for me.

— John Irving

There's no reason you should write any novel quickly.

— John Irving

“...the demands of writing and of real life are not always similar.”

— John Irving

“Novels are just another kind of cross-dressing, aren't they?”

— John Irving

I never know when I finish the novel I am writing which will be the next novel out of the station.

— John Irving

Writing is hard. I learned how to work hard from wrestling, not English courses.

— John Irving

“Garp discovered that when you are writing something, everything seems related to everything else.”

— John Irving

“And maybe it was fair; if a book was any good, it was a slap in the face to someone.”

— John Irving

My life as a writer consists of 1/8 talent and 7/8 discipline.

— John Irving

“I have digressed, which is also the kind of writer I would become.”

— John Irving